Chasing Lofty Dreams

It’s only day three of job hunting, yet the initial journey has carried on relentlessly with little hope. All three job interviews I had set up this week were scams. Without consciously trying to, I counted my chickens before they hatched. I have a terrible habit of doing this, and suddenly, when $95,000 flashed in front of my face after a suspiciously easy and quick “text chat” interview, all of my previous laments of “it’s not about the money” flew out the window.

A life in a loft in New York City. Snobbish fine china breakfasts, teas, and biscuits on rooftop gardens! Hammocking in Central Park with a good book, listening occasionally for the passerby conversation or the clinking of a biker’s gear. A dog barks in the distance. The roar of traffic is not too far behind me but just enough that I could perhaps drift asleep, if only for a moment. The sun beats down on my face in the middle of a city I have only ever had the opportunity to dream about. My only proper glance at NYC was speeding down I-95 on a no-stop trip from Boston back to Boone, North Carolina. I loved the mountains ahead, but the city I yearned for quickly faded to a blip. I had just a brief moment, a shaky picture or two, and then it was gone again, left to my imagination.

Everyone told me in high school that I would be a big-time playwright. Broadway, West End, Hollywood. Nine years ago, my high school best friend/co-star and I posed on a stage we knew so well, under show lights that had cooked us for years, as the newly elected senior superlatives, “Broadway Bound.” I remember campaigning heavily for the title, spreading the word to my friends and their friends that they should vote for me because “everyone knows it will be true!”

I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never published a play or anything for that matter. I chose an education over my dream, under the guise that being a professor was a good “backup plan” to make some money. Now, I am a professor in my “money-saving backup plan,” and I sit here, still waiting on that money. I'm still waiting on that book deal. I’m still waiting for myself to get up and get to writing, to focus on my dreams once again. I’ve spent my whole life dreaming but never once had the confidence to make my dreams come true.

I’ve spent the very first years of my adult life working hard instead of enjoying myself, and here I am, still stuck in my college town after almost ten years, life passing by all around me. I know these streets too well and the woods too little. I’ve worked my ass off to get to where I am, yet I still feel so far behind. All my friends have moved away from this place into bright, bustling cities. They have jobs they love and partner they live with. All of a sudden, I’m not married during an age when everyone suddenly has a ring on their fingers and children on their hips. While everyone else was forming their lives with their supposed “forever partners,” I wasted mine away with people I didn’t truly love.

I try not to hate being a professor, but as much as I love writing, I hate teaching it. Mostly, I'm not too fond of the looks my students give me, as if they would rather be anywhere else. It's like they don’t understand a single thing that leaves my lips. Either that or they don’t care. Instead, they occupy space in a stale, fluorescent classroom surrounded by their fellow disinterested peers. They swipe on their phones, plug in their airpods, or glare out the window until the very last minute of class, when their feet tap in anxious anticipation for my go-ahead to leave for the day, “Alright, guys, have a good weekend.”

I’ve tried my best to leave my students with the impact that writing has had on me. Writing both saved my life and ruined me. Writing is both the ail of my depression and the cause of it. Writing is a painfully solitary act, and living in the mountains makes this isolation even worse. You’re surrounded by beauty, yet forced to accept a reality in which capturing it must come second to making a living. The living is all around you, but your bills determine your life. All the while, I face down the blank stares of my students, who want to learn anything other than writing.

I wish more people understood and appreciated the art of writing. It’s not just a way to live through the eyes of another or a way to connect with your deepest, most vulnerable self; writing is a way to see the world around you and know you’re free to change the narrative. Whatever happened to students with thoughts on the tips of their tongues, biting the ends of pencils to ponder how to write it out? Whatever happened to late-night inventions, whiteboard hypotheses, and the woes of investigative journalism? Oh, to discover new ideas, to capture a world once trapped in your imagination. Oh, to see the world through the eyes of a nihilistic sociopath, a shell-shocked war veteran, an imprisoned woman, or a dung beetle.

Whatever happened to the time when I wrote for myself? I miss those days of judgeless innocence when I cared more about writing what I loved just for sheer fun. When I spent an all-nighter writing, it would bring joy instead of fatigue, and I would write things to share instead of self-consciously hiding my work away out of fear of judgment and rejection. I used to take each rejection and criticism as a challenge to do better, write faster, and create art that was even more moving, visceral, and raw. I used to make people laugh, cry, gasp, and ponder. I scored all my plays and included the music I heard as I wrote to move the audience and force them to witness the folds of my imagination.

When I stop writing for myself, I stop living. Instead, I live for expectations; I crave the applause of the theatre. I miss the acceptance of my parents, who, somewhere down the line, stopped saying they were proud of my writing, mainly because, like the critics, I was too scared to show it to them. I live for the attention and gratitude of my students instead of focusing on what I am teaching them. And in doing so, I feel like I lost something vital, raw, and irreplaceable.

Perhaps the universe is shaking me awake. Maybe my job hunt, string of disappointments, and lack of interest in teaching tell me it’s time to stop dreaming of the lofts, the lights, and the applause. I need to start chasing them again with the same unrestrained passion I had as a teenager, now with the wisdom of the craft to back up my achievements. I can’t keep sitting here, staring out windows like my distracted students, dreaming of the writer I used to be. If I’m tired of the isolating mountains, the fluorescent blind of classroom lights, and the blank stares, I need to stop waiting for permission to leave them behind.

I need only write—not for my students, my parents, or society, not even for a paycheck or the dreams of New York. I need to write because it is the only way to live. It is the only way to reclaim my joy, establish a routine, see the world, travel, and be myself. I have buried my inner artist under the dirt of doubt, but I need to remind myself of how I felt on that stage: free to imagine, to create, to experience, and to connect.